meaning of message unclear

[André]

John Bailey a écrit :
> On 07/05/2010 01:27 AM, André wrote:
>    
>> hello
>> Up to now I've only used Pidgin (and Gaim before) with Yahoo Messenger,
>> without any problems.
>> All my contacts have been with Yahoo.
>> I'm trying to add a contact with a hotmail.fr address,
>>      
> MSN addresses must be added to Yahoo accounts as, for example,
> "msn/user at hotmail.fr" in order for Pidgin to pick up that it is an MSN user.
> Otherwise, Pidgin assumes the user is a Yahoo Messenger user, which is obviously
> wrong in this case.
>
> John
Actually I discovered that my firewall was active -- I'm behind a router 
with NAT, so it wasn't really useful, and is usually inactive -- so I 
turned it off and it seems to work (I'll eventually configure it to pass 
Pidgin communications)
  -- at least the contact was accepted, I had the usual contact 
acceptance dialog for my side generating a contact with the correct name 
as alias with no red circle, and a message was received.  Although I 
haven't yet communicated while my contact was on line.
Note that it has the yahoo network icon.  I don't yet know if that means 
that my contact opened a Yahoo account to make contact, or that it 
appears because Yahoo can access the msn network.

I also just found from yahoo documentation that only the email address 
is required for yahoo to access directly the networks "windows live 
messenger", "office communications server", "lotus sametime" and 
"reuters messaging".
The "msn/" prefix may theoretically work -- I got a response to accept a 
contact from them also -- but probably since Pidgin had converted the 
contact address to "msn" only, they weren't unblocked.  (The red circle 
with slash remained, and the usual accept contact dialog did not display.)

By the way, I checked the blist.xml file, and all contacts starting with 
"msn/" were all converted to "msn" only, despite initially being stored 
in the file as entered.
Note that the associated email address is not accessible from the Pidgin 
menu, although it seems to be retained in the blist.xml file.
Also note that the connexion passwords are stored in clear text, which 
is not very secure if the user's logon account is compromised.  (The 
file protections are optimal otherwise.)

Anyway, thanks for your response.
- andré